Sanger Project Celebrates Black History Month

In celebration of black history Month, we are reprinting portions of an article from our newsletter # 28 dated Fall 2001. It is as relevant today as it was 15 years ago. For the complete article see https://www.nyu.edu/projects/sanger/articles/bc_or_race_control.php.

“Birth Control or Race Control? Sanger and the Negro Project”

The Negro Project, instigated in 1939 by Margaret Sanger, was one of the first major undertakings of the new Birth Control Federation of America (BCFA), the product of a merger between the American Birth Control League and Sanger’s Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau, and one of the more controversial campaigns of the birth control movement. Developed by white birth control reformers, who consulted with African-Americans for help in promoting the project only well after its inception, the Negro Project and associated campaigns were, nevertheless, widely supported by such black leaders as Mary McLeod Bethune, W. E. B. DuBois, and Rev. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.  Influenced strongly by both the eugenics movement and the progressive welfare programs of the New Deal era, the Negro Project was, from the start, largely indifferent to the needs of the black community and constructed in terms and with perceptions that today smack of racism.

Life Magazine, May 6, 1940, p.66

What it became was not the project Sanger had first envisioned. As she wrote in an initial fund-raising request to Albert Lasker, the wealthy advertising executive just beginning his post-business career in medical philanthropy, she simply hoped to help “a group notoriously underprivileged and handicapped to a large measure by a ‘caste’ system that operates as an added weight upon their efforts to get a fair share of the better things in life. To give them the means of helping themselves is perhaps the richest gift of all. We believe birth control knowledge brought to this group, is the most direct, constructive aid that can be given them to improve their immediate situation.” Sanger viewed the Negro Project as another effort to help African-Americans gain better access to safe contraception and maintain birth control services in their community as she had attempted to do in Harlem a decade earlier when Sanger’s Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau (BCCRB), in cooperation with the New York Urban League, opened a birth control clinic there.  (MS to Lasker, July 10, 1939, Mary Lasker Papers, Columbia University, MS Unfilmed )

By the late 1930s, the birth control activists began to focus on high birth rates and poor quality of life in the South, alerted to alarming Southern poverty by a 1938 U.S. National Resource Committee report which asserted that Southern poverty drained resources from other parts of the country. Starting in the mid-1930s, Sanger sent field workers into the rural South to establish birth control services in poor communities and conduct research on cheaper and more effective contraceptive….The birth control movement also looked to Southern states as the ideal region in which to secure funding under New Deal legislation and to establish birth control services as part of state and federal public health  programs….

Sanger testifying in Congress, 1934

In 1937, North Carolina became the first state to incorporate birth control services into a statewide public health program, followed by six other southern states. However, these successes were clouded by the failure of birth controllers to overcome segregated health services and improve African-Americans’ access to contraceptives. Hazel Moore, a veteran lobbyist and health administrator, ran a birth control project under Sanger’s direction and found that black women in several Virginia counties were very responsive to birth control education. A 1938 trip to Tennessee further convinced Sanger of the desire of African-Americans in that region to control their fertility and the need for specific programs in birth control education aimed at the black community. (Hazel Moore, “Birth Control for the Negro,” 1937, Sophia Smith Collection, Florence Rose Papers.)

In 1939 Sanger teamed with Mary Woodward Reinhardt, secretary of the newly formed BCFA, to secure a large donor to fund an educational campaign to teach African-American women in the South about contraception. Sanger, Reinhardt and Sanger’s secretary, Florence Rose, drafted a report on “Birth Control and the Negro,” skillfully using language that appealed both to eugenicists fearful of unchecked black fertility and progressives committed to shepherding African-Americans into middle-class culture. The report stated that “[N]egroes present the great problem of the South,” as they are the group with “the greatest economic, health and social problems,” and outlined a practical birth control program geared toward a population characterized as largely illiterate and that “still breed carelessly and disastrously,” a line borrowed from a June 1932 Birth Control Review article by W.E.B. DuBois. Armed with this paper, Reinhardt initiated contact between Sanger and Albert Lasker (soon to be Reinhardt’s husband), who pledged $20,000 starting in Nov. 1939. (“Birth Control and the Negro,” July 1939, Lasker Papers)

However, once funding was secured, the project slipped from Sanger’s hands. She had proposed that the money go to train “an up and doing modern minister, colored, and an up and doing modern colored medical man” at her New York clinic who would then tour “as many Southern cities and organizations and churches and medical societies as they can get before” and “preach and preach and preach!” She believed that after a year of such “educational agitation” the Federation could support a “practical campaign for supplying mothers with contraceptives.” Before going in and establishing clinics, Sanger thought it critical to gain the support and involvement of the African-American community (not just its leaders) and establish a foundation of trust. Her proposal derived from the work of activists in the field, discussions with black leaders and her experience with the New York clinics. Sanger understood the concerns of some within the black community about having Northern whites intervene in the most intimate aspect of their lives. “I do not believe” she warned, “that this project should be directed or run by white medical men. The Federation should direct it with the guidance and assistance of the colored group & perhaps, particularly and specifically formed for the purpose.” To succeed, she wrote, “It takes a very strong heart and an individual well entrenched in the community. . . .” (MS to Gamble, Nov. 26, 1939, and MS to Robert Seibels, Feb. 12, 1940 [MSM S17:514, 891].)

Sanger reiterated the need for black ministers to head up the project in a letter to Clarence Gamble in Dec. 1939, arguing that: “We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.” This passage has been repeatedly extracted by Sanger’s detractors as evidence that she led a calculated effort to reduce the black population against their will. From African-American activist Angela Davis on the left to conservative commentator Dinesh D’Souza on the right, this statement alone has condemned Sanger to a perpetual waltz with Hitler and the KKK….The argument that Sanger co-opted black clergy and community leaders to exterminate their own race not only gives Sanger unwarranted credit as a remarkably cunning manipulator, but also suggests that African-Americans were passive receptors of birth control reform, incapable of making their own decisions about family size; and that black leaders were ignorant and gullible.

In the end, Sanger’s plan for an educational campaign to precede the demonstration project lost out to the white medical and public relations men running the new Federation. They were particularly swayed by Robert Seibels (1890-1955), chairman of the Committee on Maternal Welfare of the South Carolina Medical Association, who was chosen by the BCFA to direct a Negro demonstration project in that state. Seibels distrusted Sanger and her loyal crew of field workers, calling them “dried-up female fanatics” who had the gall to tell doctors what to do. (Robert E. Seibels to Frederick C. Holden, Jan. 28, 1939, Sophia Smith Collection, Records of PPFA.) He saw no need for prerequisite education and propaganda and advised incorporating birth control services for blacks into a general public health program. The BCFA then dismissed the notion of building a community-based, black-staffed demonstration clinic that could become permanent, and instead set in motion a plan that closely resembled the vaccination and VD caravans that swept in and out of the region.

Lasker’s money was used to set up demonstration projects between 1940 and 1942 in several rural South Carolina counties, under Seibels’s direction, and in urban Nashville, TN under the auspices of the Nashville City Health Department. In South Carolina, the BCFA hired two African-American nurses to make house calls and meet with women in groups at schools and community centers to encourage them to visit a clinic, but contraceptives were dispensed by white doctors only. In Nashville, demonstration clinics were opened at the Bethlehem Center, a black settlement house, and later at Fisk University, and black nurses were eventually employed with some success there as well.

The Federation immediately claimed that the Negro Project had exceeded its expectations and even persuaded Life Magazine to carry a photo spread of the demonstration clinics in South Carolina May1940. But relatively few women, (only about 3,000) visited the demonstration clinics to receive contraceptive instruction. And among those that did, the dropout rates were high as many women would not return to white doctors for follow-up exams, though the black nurses in both Nashville and South Carolina met with greater success. In 1942 the Federation ended funding for the demonstration clinics claiming to have developed “workable procedures” for providing contraception to African-Americans in both rural and urban communities; but no other clinics appear to have opened as a result of the Project. (“Better Health for 13,000,000,” PPFA Report, April 16, 1943, Rose Papers; John Overton, “A Birth Control Service Among Urban Negroes,” Human Fertility, Aug. 1942, 97-101; Life Magazine, May 6, 1940, pp. 64-68.)

However, the “Division of Negro Service,” a department created at the BCFA initially to oversee the Negro Project, did implement some of the educational goals Sanger outlined. Under the direction of Florence Rose, with money raised by Sanger, and inspired by an advisory council of eminent black leaders, educators and health professionals, the Division undertook significant education projects from 1940-1943. Rose flooded every black organization in the country with planned parenthood literature, set up exhibits, instigated local and national press coverage and hired a black woman doctor, Mae McCarroll, to teach birth control techniques to black doctors and lobby medical groups. Though still stinging from the rejection of her earlier proposal for the Negro Project, Sanger wrote enthusiastically to Albert Lasker in July of 1942 about what she now framed as a pioneering effort: “I believe that the Negro question is coming definitely to the fore in America, not only because of the war, but in anticipation of the place the Negro will occupy after the peace. I think it is magnificent that we are in on the ground floor, helping Negroes to control their birth rate, to reduce their high infant and maternal death rate, to maintain better standards of health and living for those already born, and to create better opportunities for those who will be born. In other words, we’re giving Negroes an opportunity to help themselves, and to rise to their own heights through education and the principles of a democracy.” (MS to Lasker, July 9, 1942, MSM S21:404)

But the BCFA (which changed its name to the Planned Parenthood Federation of America in 1942) forced Florence Rose to leave in 1943 &, a result of her inability to follow new bureaucratic procedures and her allegiance to Sanger, who was immersed in her own clashes with Federation staff. With Rose’s departure, the Division of Negro Service floundered and soon shut down. The Federation delegated “Negro” work to other departments and eventually passed off remnants of the program to state affiliates.

Arguments persist about whether or not the Negro Project was purely a racist endeavor (search for “Sanger” “Negro Project” and “racism” on the Internet and be prepared for the onslaught). Certainly the patriarchal racism of the time that guided many of the social policies in Washington and the practices of philanthropic and charitable organizations working to “lift up” African-Americans, dictated both the Federation’s and Sanger’s approach to blacks and birth control. The public rationale for the Project was rooted in economics, tax-payer burden, and the social threats posed by what was perceived to be an exploding black underclass, rather than the health and sexual liberation of black women (though it should be notes that the birth control movement largely ignored the issue of women’s —black or white— sexual autonomy in the interwar years). And there is no doubt that a good number of medical professionals involved in the birth control movement exhibited strong racist sentiments, some of them arguing for and even carrying out compulsory sterilization on black women considered to be of low intelligence and therefore not capable of choosing not to control their fertility, as well as on those deemed morally or behaviorally deviant. But there is no evidence that Sanger or even the Federation coerced or intended to coerce black women into using birth control. The fundamental belief, underscored at every meeting, mentioned in much of the behind-the-scenes correspondence, and evident in all the printed material put out by the Division of Negro Service, was that uncontrolled fertility presented the greatest burden to the poor, and Southern blacks were among the poorest Americans. In fact, the Negro Project did not differ very much from the earlier birth control campaigns in the rural South designed to test simpler methods on poor, uneducated and mostly white agricultural communities. Following these other efforts in the South, it would have been more racist, in Sanger’s mind, to ignore African-Americans in the South than to fail at trying to raise the health and economic standards of their communities.

Birth Control Breaks into the South

Tags

birth control, margaret sanger, north carolina, sanger, south

Birth control advocate Margaret Sanger.

One of the most contentious questions surrounding Margaret Sanger is whether or not she was racist, and it sometimes seems that people only know who she is because of claims that she was a racist/Nazi/eugenicist. It is a question that we here at the Sanger Papers have addressed repeatedly on this blog (that’s three separate links, and here’s a few more, including an analysis of a recent scholarly article also explaining that Margaret Sanger was not a Nazi racist).

Sanger’s first foray into the South provides another perspective on her views of race, particularly as a counterpoint to the speech that she gave to a chapter of the Ku Klux Klan in Silver Lake, New Jersey. That speech, which Sanger herself called “one of the weirdest experiences I had in lecturing,” not least because “I was sure that if I uttered one word, such as abortion, outside the usual vocabulary of these women they would go off into hysteria,” is frequently pointed to by those who would continue to insist that Sanger was a racist who advocated sterilization for African American women. Unfortunately, no transcript for the speech survives.

Elizabeth City, North Carolina, was a shipping center that also manufactured lumber and cotton. In 1919, African Americans made up approximately 37% of the city’s population. William Oscar Saunders, the editor of the Elizabeth City Independent, was responsible for organizing the first speech, the only one that Sanger expected to give, was noted for his opposition to both racism and antisemitism, as well as his support for birth control. It seems unlikely that he would have invited Sanger to speak on birth control had he felt that she was a racist.

For the speech that Sanger gave on November 2, 1919, a much better record survives in the form of an article written by Sanger — and it is both telling and fascinating. The planned lecture, entitled “Woman’s Place in the Twentieth Century,” was given to about eight hundred people. The Elizabeth City Independent reported that it was “the first public meeting for the discussion of birth control ever held in the south.” Considering this, Sanger was necessarily nervous about how she and her message would be received:

I had the feeling that it would be hard to break the ice for the birth control movement in a city in which not even a suffragist had delivered a public lecture.

Fortunately, Sanger was pleasantly surprised; the experience

was in every way a gratifying surprise to me… To my delight…I found that people, both white and black, in Elizabeth City, N.C., were so eager to know about birth control that every possible moment of my time was given to speaking.

This single scheduled lecture proved such a success that a whole series of unplanned talks followed. First, immediately following the lecture, Sanger addressed a group of women only, “of all classes and conditions,” followed by a question-and-answer session of elderly women who were so appreciative that the birth control movement would prevent their daughters from suffering what they had suffered in having such large families.

That evening, Sanger gave “a public address for negroes in a negro church [Corner Stone Baptist Church]…followed the next day by a short talk on ‘Education’ at the negro normal school, and in the afternoon a lecture for negro women only on methods of birth control.” As a result of all of these lectures, a group formed a committee to begin the process of establishing a birth control clinic for the mill workers. All this happened, as Sanger recalled, “between noon on Sunday and three o’clock Monday afternoon.”

For a city that had not even had anyone give a public talk about voting rights for women, it is amazing that Sanger was able to speak to so many people, from all different walks of life. She noted that

Never have I met with more sympathy, more serious attention, more complete understanding than in my addresses to the white and black people of this Southern mill town. Each element in the audience seemed to look at the question from its own standpoint. All in all, these audiences were a striking demonstration of birth control’s universal message of freedom and betterment… If Elizabeth City is an index of the South, it is ready, waiting, crying for the message of birth control.

Amusing Twitter Debate With Anti-Choice Partisans

Tags

Abortion, factchecking, margaret sanger, myths, Planned Parenthood Federation of America

You know, we are a pretty laid back group here at the Sanger Papers. Its unusual for vicious debates to break out, but that was before we launched the @SangerPapers Twitter account a few months ago. The Twitter sphere is full of people who are rabidly opposed to Planned Parenthood, and in order to attack the organization, they tend to latch onto historic myths and misrepresentations of its founder, Margaret Sanger. Naturally, in the name of historical accuracy (and feminism), we venture from time to time out into the battlefield of representation, and encounter people who seem profoundly unattached to anything like truth or reason. Sanger undoubtedly did and said enough questionable things in her lifetime, what is the point of making stuff up? Here are some particularly juicy highlights from yesterday’s Twitter debates about Sanger with a right-wing ideologues.

@jamespeabo @OBAMA_CZAR Actually the Nazis hated Sanger, had her books burned. sangerpapers.wordpress.com/2010/11/10/set… Do you have any sources for your claim?
 
— Sanger Papers (@SangerPapers) June 6, 2012

  No one managed to get back to me about evidence. Because there is none. But that doesn’t seem too important to this kind of debate. 

@OBAMA_CZAR @SangerPapers @jamespeabo this is a hallmark of leftist thought,stems from collective ownership of everything & every one — ted schuler (@wolframrose) June 6, 2012

@OBAMA_CZAR Respectfully disagree. If you would like a historical take on Sanger and the Negro Project, read: sangerpapers.wordpress.com/2012/02/23/ano…
&nbsp
— Sanger Papers (@SangerPapers) June 6, 2012

 And then, the clue that you aren’t talking about Sanger at all, Sanger is just a stand-in for a much more difficult issue with a quickly moving target: 

@OBAMA_CZAR I think women who have had abortions should be considered authorities of their own choices. Ask them if they feel targeted. — Sanger Papers (@SangerPapers) June 6, 2012

  And my personal favorite: you are a liar and accuracy means nothing. 

@OBAMA_CZAR Actually our blog is based on the archival collection of Margaret Sanger Papers. That’s what good scholarship is made of.

— Sanger Papers (@SangerPapers) June 6, 2012

Is meaningful (Twitter) debate possible? Or is it just a forum for two opposed sides to shout about their beliefs? It was clear by the end that Ms. ObamaCzar was not talking about Margaret Sanger at all, but about abortion politics. It’s slightly ironic that Sanger didn’t condone abortion and it wasn’t practiced at Planned Parenthood until after Roe v Wade made it legal in 1973, seven years after her death.

Another Look at Margaret Sanger and Race

Tags

Chicago Defender, Earl Conrad, Interviews, Prejudice, Racism

Courtesy of the Sophia Smith Collection

In a 1945 interview published in the Chicago Defender, Margaret Sanger said:

“Discrimination is a world-wide thing. It has to be opposed everywhere. That is why I feel the Negro’s plight here is linked with that of the oppressed around the globe. The big answer, as I see it, is the education of the white man. The white man is the problem. It is the same as with the Nazis. We must change the white attitudes. That is where it lies.”

Wait one minute! I thought that Margaret Sanger was a racist Nazi bent on exterminating African-Americans who hobnobbed with Hitler! That’s what the Internet says. Accusations like these, once found only among fringe groups, on blogs and homemade websites, have been moving increasingly into the mainstream media. As historians who have dedicated years to making Sanger’s papers easily accessible, readable, and understandable it is disheartening to see these ahistorical attacks.

One of the difficulties of exploring Sanger’s views on race is that much is made of a very small number of historical documents. Though she sought to expand access to birth control information to all women, not just African-Americans, Sanger’s efforts to reach poor African-American women in the South in the late 1930s have been held up as proof of her malign intent to exterminate black babies. (for details on the Negro Project see our Newsletter article “Birth Control or Race Control”) Sanger’s views on eugenics, where she supports the idea that those less fit should have smaller families, have been interpreted to refer specifically to African-Americans, despite her explicit statement that her use of the term “unfit” did not refer to specific races or religions, a position about which she said: “I frankly deplore.” (“Questionnaire,” Feb. 13, 1934, in Selected Papers of Margaret Sanger, Volume 2, p. 277.) What we have found is that in the larger context of Sanger’s work, her work with African-American women doesn’t differ in any substantive way from the way that she worked with white women. But demonstrating this is not easy to fit into sound bites and Sanger left no documents that explicitly discussed issues of race.

Or did she? While searching the digital Historical African American Newspapers collection available through ProQuest, we came across the Chicago Defender interview. This short article contains possibly the most explicit comments about race and racism Sanger ever made. Published in the American Viewpoint column, the interview, entitled “On U.S. Birth and Bias Control” was 1945 conducted by Earl Conrad, a white journalist working in the Defender’s New York Bureau.

Conrad and Sanger discussed the problems facing American Negros as part of a broader world problem. “It is not just a Negro problem,” Sanger remarked, “Like the problems of the people of India, of minorities everywhere, it is a democratic problem. We have got to work all together on these issues.” She spoke of her trips to India and China, and said, “Knowing our own problem, it gave me greater sympathy with the others, with what I saw in the Orient. I can recall many horrible things I saw in India. I once saw a white man come out of a train; there were five or six Indians in his way; he just kicked them away–literally, with his foot. There were a hundred people around, who were powerless to strike him. The white man’s power and the Indian’s defenselessness were so unjust. “

In discussing birth control work among African-Americans, Sanger mused, “From the very beginning of birth control, there was the problem of approaching the Negro. Soon after I launched the campaign, a Harlem Methodist leader, who was most intelligent, questioned me about birth control. He was a brilliant speaker, and he had been thinking about it. Later a man named Harrison of the Urban League took up our idea.” In addition to Hubert Harrison, Sanger had the support of W.E.B. DuBois, and Rev. William Lloyd Imes in her efforts to open a Harlem branch of her downtown birth control clinic (for more on the Harlem branch, see Newsletter article “Looking Uptown”). Talking with Conrad in 1945, she mentioned that she felt that attitudes about African-Americans were slowly changing. “When we first started out an anti-Negro white man offered me $10,000 if I started in Harlem first. His idea was simply to cut down the number of Negroes. ‘Spread it as far as you can among them,’ he said. That is, of course, not our idea. I turned him down. But that is an example of how vicious some people can be about this thing.”

Conrad asked Sanger about her experiences regarding race in the South, during her many lectures there. “I remember addressing a colored church group once. I was staying with a white doctor at the time. They didn’t let a Negro doctor introduce me to the people. The white doctor had to do it. That was in Memphis. What hangs over the South is that the Negro has been in servitude. The white southerner is slow to forget this. His attitude is the archaic in this age. Supremacist thinking belongs in the museum.”

Sanger saw collaboration as the way to overcome racism. “One thing that is most helpful is to have people working together. When you have Negroes working with whites you have the breakdown of barriers, the beginning of progress. Negro groups must take the initiative, and not wait around for integration to come to them. They must get it themselves. The struggle for it will bring it. . . . Planned parenthood is not aimed at any one people. It is for all, and the objective is to do away with the waste of life. A sickly race is a weak race. As long as Negro mothers die in childbirth at two and one-half times the rate of white mothers, as long as Negro babies are dying at twice the rate of white babies, colored homes will be unhappy. Negro participation in planned parenthood means democratic participation in a democratic idea. Like other democratic ideas, planned parenthood places greater value on human life and the dignity of each person. Without planning at birth, the life of Negroes as a whole in a democratic world cannot be planned.” (Earl Conrad, “On U.S. Birth and Bias Control,” Chicago Defender, Sept. 22, 1945, 11, see our digital edition (currently in beta testing), Speeches and Articles of Margaret Sanger, 1911-1959 for a full transcription.)

It is the mission of the Margaret Sanger Papers Project to locate and publish documents like this one. We are working to complete a four-volume Selected Papers of Margaret Sanger that provides a carefully transcribed and annotated set of significant documents and we are also mounting a digital edition of Sanger’s public writings, that offers complete texts, carefully proofread and indexed. We are in the last stages of this work, working on the last volume and proofreading texts in the digital edition. But with the state of the economy and the controversy over Sanger, we fear that we might be forced to close our doors before we finish our work. If you are interested in helping the Sanger Papers complete its work, please visit our website and donate.

Margaret Sanger Papers in the national spotlight

Tags

eugenics, Herman Cain, Racism, Sanger Project

Although Margaret Sanger died in 1966, debates about her legacy still shape how politicians talk about the important issue of abortion rights. On Sunday, October 30, Republican candidate for president Herman Cain gave an interview on CBS’s “Face the Nation”. He claimed that if voters wanted to understand the real meaning of abortion in America, they needed to “go back and look at the history and look at Margaret Sanger’s own words.” But Cain’s knowledge of Sanger seems more rooted in convenient myth than in historical fact. The phone has been ringing off the hook today at the Margaret Sanger Papers with journalists and commentators calling to find out the real history.

Cain claimed that early Planned Parenthood clinics were build predominately in black neighborhoods as part of a plan of racial extermination. He said, “So if you go back and look up the history–secondly, look at where most of them were build, 75 percent of those facilities were built in the black community– and Margaret Sanger’s own words, she didn’t use the word ‘genocide’ but she did talk about preventing the increasing numbers of poor blacks in this country by preventing black babies from being born.”

Although Sanger allied birth control with the eugenics movement that was popular in her era, Planned Parenthood in no way encouraged abortion among black communities. In fact, none of Sanger’s clinics performed abortions before Roe v. Wade in 1973.  Racism in the world of family planning tended to express itself in the reverse: blacks were often excluded from clinics offering birth control services. Here at the Sanger Papers, we frequently write about the issue of race in our newsletters and publications. Cathy Moran Hajo, associate editor of the Margaret Sanger Papers, has recently addressed this in her book, Birth Control on Main Street (2010). There were a handful of clinics that serviced specifically black communities, but these received little assistance from white activists. Cain’s suggestion that 75% of clinics were in black neighborhoods is completely unfounded. “Whatever the activists’ personal beliefs about race may have been,” writes Hajo, “there was no grand program to exterminate nonwhites or the poor.”

This is not the first time Cain has distorted the history of birth control in order to advance his political views. In April of 2010, Cain made claims about Planned Parenthood’s alleged genocide plan that earned PolitiFact’s “Pants on Fire” status, meaning that they found no truth to the claim whatsoever. In fact, PolitiFact said, “Cain’s claim is a ridiculous, cynical play of the race card.”

Sunday’s interview is no different. In the Washington Post today, Glenn Kessler decries Cain’s rewriting of birth control history, relying on the research of Hajo and others to discredit this misuse of the past for politically expedient ends. CNN and Factcheck.org have also called the Sanger Papers looking for more information, and we expected to see pieces from them soon.